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HomeMy WebLinkAboutAl Hanson TranscriptionCity of College Station Heritage Programs Oral History Interviewee: Al Hanson Interviewer: Tom Turbiville Transcriber: Brooke Linsenbardt Place: College Station, Texas Project: Veterans of the Valley 00:00: Tom Turbiville (TT): So what, just sort of educate me a little bit about what your role was? What, what unit were in and, and what was your job? 00:08: Al Hanson (AH): I was in the fifth Air Corps, fifth Air Force. And, fff [inaudible] two carrier command. I was a radio, radar, operator, in the plane. I communicated with the ground, relayed messages between the captain or the navigator, to the base. And I’d report our positions every say, every thirty minutes, where we are in case we got shot down, or hit a storm, or run out of gas, whatever. I wanted to know, they didn’t have to tell me to do that. Just like they didn’t have to tell me to buckle up, when you get in the plane, you, you’re ready to take off. They didn’t have to tell me to do that. It’s just like driving a car, I, I buckle up automatically. You sure buckled up on that airplane. [laugh] TT: Yeah. 01:00: AH: Oh hell yeah. TT: Yeah. I betcha did. I bet there was some. 01:02: AH: Yeah. Yeah. You’re nervous, you’re, you’re nervous. You was on a strange. It seemed like every, every day you on a strange airfield and you had to know. Some of them you’d land, you come out over the trees, hit the ground, and hit the runway and when you get to the end, you better be up. A lot of these runways, you know, fighter planes and bomber, they couldn’t land them because they were too short and, maybe the ocean was right there too. Like it was at Okinawa. And we all supplies. It says troop carrier. Troop carrier’s ass. It’s not recording is it? TT: Yeah. You’re good man. It’s okay. I know how to bleep go ahead. 01:42: AH: Oh and we hauled, we had Japanese prisoners. Nurses. Gasoline. Five-gallon cans. Bombs. Jeeps. Paratroopers. Army troops. Just everything you c-, imaginable. We won the war I believe, because I, the other day o-, o-, on T.V. it said that the, the landing crafts and the C-47, D.C.-3, the gooney bird, were the best two mechanical, inventions of World War II. [Inaudible] that’s hard to believe isn’t it? But it, it actually said that, I saw it on T.V. And when we flied like we try to be four or five planes, would take off at one time and stay together ‘cause, we lost planes we never knew, what happened, either it was shot down or we fly into a place like Oshima. That’s where Ernie Pod, you ever heard of him? TT: Sure. 02:45: AH: You know he was killed there, once chance in a thousand. He was shot, I went to his grave. And, we just, at night, seemed like every night we’d get bombed there. But boy that Navy’d open up, with the ships. We never flew over Navy ships. When we come into land, we, on an island, we didn’t go over the water ‘cause they, we knew they’d shoot us down. Our own people. We’d come around and get over the land and come into that, ‘cause those guys were trigger happy in the Navy. They’d shoot at anything. And they shot down a lot of their own planes. And, these different islands I went to, just, hauling stuff. Sometime I be gone a week at a time, from my base. Well I get back and then I’d have a lot of mail and stuff, and maybe rest a couple of days, there you’re gone again. TT: You had several different bases though right? I mean, what, what? 03:35: AH: No I had a home base. But we’d go to, different islands, I would haul stuff. And the first thing you know is, “Hey you gotta take this. Here. You need, they need three engines in Hollandia.” And you’d take those in and go there first and haul you gotta haul something else to someplace else. It was just. It was something. It just. TT: So you spent just about the whole war in the air. 03:58: AH: Yes, yes. Here the some of the places I’m gonna mention. TT: Tell them. 04:03: AH: Townsville, Australia, New Guinea, Maritime, [inaudible], some of you radio people gonna know these some of these places. [Inaudible], [inaudible], [inaudible], Port Moresby, Borneo. Borneo was after the war, was over. No it wasn’t, no it wasn’t, it was still going, yeah. Philippines, [inaudible], Mend-, [inaudible], Manila, [inaudible], Subic Bay, [inaudible], Peleliu—that was a bad place—Angaur, Okinawa, Oshima—where Ernie Pod was killed—and in Japan I went to, to Tachikawa, Asuka, Yokohama, Korea, [inaudible]. Incidentally at Tachikawa. My son was during the Vietnam War, he was there. Same place I went. TT: I’ll be darned. 04:50: AH: Yeah, and one time we flew into. So many incidence, was flying into Manila. Manila was s-, still on fire and there were ships out in the, in the Manila Bay smoking, s-, sinking. And we came out of that engine, right engine started actin’ up. We had troops on there. Started actin’ up. Well he called the tower and said, “We’re comin’ in.” You can’t, you got to get in the pattern. Well there was B-25, B-47s, B-51s, it doesn’t matter. He said, “They better look out ‘cause we’re coming in. We’re loaded.” And we just, he just stepped right in the pattern and, dropped down on that ground. Otherwise we cou-, you know, could have crashed. And the bad thing about the 47s, or any, any carrier plane of, of that type. Any of ‘em. Your load has to be balanced. And if it shifts on you. We had a jeep wasn’t tied down right back there. [radio changes] 05:51: AH: That shifted on us and we thought we was gonna hit the, China Sea. Scared us all. Somethin’ like that and, and we had rations, we had B-rations that we, carried with us. It had bacon in there, bacon and, uh cocoa and, can biscuits. But, it wasn’t really that good though but it, it tastes better than nothin’. TT: Kept you alive. Did you, did you come under much enemy fire up there at all? 06:21: AH: I never, we never know. Like Stanley Mountains we flew away all the time. We know we were shot at. That’s in New Guinea, the Stanley Mountains. And, if you got hit you knew it, but you could have been shot at and not known it, but. But. With flying these island and, man we’d, we’d unload there and we’d get out there ‘cause Japs usually—Japanese—usually bombed at night, not in the day time. And we’d land in these air strips. And all along the side there, there’d be air-, Japanese airplanes. Our airplanes. Just they’d just, get a bulldozer, just push ‘em over the side of the runway and come in and land, and you look at ‘em and you, you think, “That could have been me.” And. [sigh] TT: Yeah. 07:06: AH: It, it so many. This. We flew over to C-54. There was five cruises. Five people to the cruise. The pilot, co-pilot, navigator. Radio man and the engineer. Was five, we were hot stuff. We were the first, one of the first pathfinder cruise, school, and then after [inaudible] to graduate. The pathfind-, the latest thing on radar. Boy we were hot stuff. Got to California. San Francisco. My first earthquake. [Inaudible] C-54 took twelve hours to fly to Hawaii. From Hawaii, went to Johnson Island. The next island was Toralla. That’s when you got to thinking, “Man, [inaudible] we get into here?” You see all the little half tracks and tanks, half-burned up and tore up and graves just everywhere. And, from there I went to Guadalcanal. And, there you get in the tropics. You can really feel it. From Frisco to the Tropics down there. It’s a different feeling there. And from there the Biak New Guinea. That was a hell hole man. And, when we landed there, well you know, everybody knows that we’re replacements. Well this one ol’ boy come up here in this half-tr-, truck. Oh he looked. You take [inaudible] in there, from malaria. And your skin starts to turning yellow. This little boy come up here in that, that truck to take us to the base, the office. And he looked bad. Just had on shorts and G.I. shoes. And I said. And there’s crashed airplanes on side of the runway and everything. And boy we was all looking. Here we are with clean uniforms and shined shoes and hot stuff. We were the, new pathfinders. The latest thing on radar the United States had. I said, “Man.” I said, “You, you all.” I said, “Fellow you’ve all really had it rough here.” He said, “No. No. You, you should have been here before we had the Coke machine.” That, that really made me feel kind of funny. Oh they had it tough man. And you see a lot of those guys that we called [inaudible]. finger nails comin’ out. Toenails. They call it jungle rot. With malaria. A lot of just. Diseases hurt most of us over there. TT: Was that a lot of your, your cargo? Was patients? 09:44: AH: No, no. About one time was patients. Several times was Japanese prisoners. And I tell you what, they, they bring ‘em up and unload ‘em. They start bowing at us. I mean bowing. ‘Cause I guess they heard that we, you know, when we’re airborne while we’re, throw ‘em all out of the airplane. But we never did do that. People said we did; we didn’t though. And gasoline is what I didn’t like hauling. And bombs, .50 caliber. We hauled everything. I mean it just. We won the war. Transferred the supplies. We really did. We go to different places and. I lost two airplanes. It just happened I wasn’t in ‘em. But, I always had my stuff in there. Everything I had owned. That one, one time we. This was at Peleliu. That’s plow, right out of Lady Guff. And. Magnita-something was only crashed and burned out. But everybody got out, but I lost all my stuff. The Maritime. I had my. Just lucky I wasn’t. Nobody ever got killed in these two crashes, but twice I lost everything I accumulated. And I had a lot of stuff man. We would go to these places. Jump out with a pair of pliers and screwdrivers, and get those Japanese clocks. I brought back six of them, I don’t know where they are. I’d like to show you them though. And, souvenirs. We got the souvenirs. And, see, just so many things that. TT: Were there a lot of. In, in your flying. That much flying, there must have been some close calls. I mean where you thought. 11:22: AH: Well e-, either, either engine go out or just make it out, just make it out the runway or engine [inaudible] or. We had one, in our squad, it crashed. Wings went out. And, and. Most of that, [inaudible] as far as I know of gettin’ shot at, I didn’t see it. But I wouldn’t. One of the, amusing things that one night, my turn to have guard duty, to guard the airplane. Incidentally as crews, we didn’t ever stay together, once we got over, we just separated. Oh incidentally [inaudible] all this radar stuff, they didn’t have it over yet. So all the training we got was for nothin’. So one afternoon they said, they called me Tex, “Tex, you gotta, gotta have guard duty tonight, on, guard the plane, because the, the Japanese were always up in the hills. Oh and speaking about that one time we had, there was some Army guys up in these hills looking for these Japanese, and they, we had to drop supplies to them. Parachute supplies to ‘em. Of these hills and mountains. Buddy that’s terrible. Goin’ over the plane it drops down, [inaudible] air currents. And these parachutes like, yellow would be say ammunition and red would be uh, water or food or, these parachutes were different colors. And, and you open this big door. Like these doors that the jeeps and stuff come in. And these Army guys, they were all tied in there ‘cause the current, the plane ship, well you’d move you’d go out with the parachute. And they’d throw that stuff out and, and it, it had a walkie-talkie. “No, no you’re, you’re, you’re, you’re two miles east of us.” Here we go again, gotta come back. Let’s use those flyers.” “No, no you’re, you’re behind us.” I’m gonna keep going back and forth dropping these parachutes out with all this. I didn’t like that at all, it, it, it was scary. So I had guard duty and went out there and there was about, fifteen guys, under the plane. I said, “Oh, they’re gonna. We’re gonna haul them somewhere tomorrow. Boy they, look, they look tough.” I said, “Oh, you all, you all gonna go with us tomorrow? We’re going somewhere?” “Oh no we just been,” they said, “We got a, a rest leave.” Zig Zag pass, that’s between Subic Bay and Manila. Said, “We’ve been up there having a battle with the Japanese.” “Well what are you doing here?” “Well this, that’s what they call a rest leave. We’re guarding your plane.” I said, “Well that isn’t right.” So they started talking about Zig Zag Pass. So I said, “Well wait. Y’all guys wanna hear some music. You wanna hear Tokyo Road. You wanna hear B.B.C.—that’s British Broadcast. Or what about, Frisco?” And man I think there was a plane, there’d be one guy outside that could have played. I get these music for ‘em, hear the States or, or Tokyo Road. Man, they just loved it! I said, “Well let’s eat somethin’.” So I got the, the rations out. Bacon, can. Bacon in a can. Then they went crazy. Cocoa. I fixed ‘em cocoa. And man they had a good time and I really felt like I helped somebody. And they stayed up all night, listening to the radio. I kept it going all night long. So a couple of days later, my buddy and I said, “Listen.” Harold Weaver, he was another radio operator. I said, “Let’s go.” Am I bothering you? TT: No. [Inaudible] no. [Inaudible.] 14:58: AH: You ever heard of Subic Bay. TT: I’ve heard of it, but no. 15:02: AH: Yeah it’s north. It’s a big, big Naval Base there. We shut it down and moved out of there. Man it was big. I said, well the Zig Zag Pass up through the mountains, the only way you could get from northern Luzon to southern Luzon, to Manila. And he said, “Why don’t we go and. Let’s go to Zig Zag Pass and see some of that action.” I said, “Hell yeah.” So when we put on. We all had .45s. Everybody had .45s. We put those on boy. And put on some clean pants and shoes and that. We were gonna go to Zig Zag Pass! We wanna see some of this, action. Here we go, you just hitchhike. You know they’ll pick you, the jeeps will pick you up, if you hitchhike. And, and. Sass, I mean he’s going fast. We’re going to the front. Okay as we got closer and closer we could hear the firin’. And we see all these tr-, trees, not a tree standing. Just bomb craters. Then you see these, jeeps coming back. I mean going like hell. Ambulances. Guys wa-, walkin’. Some of ‘em are walking. Maybe a, a tank is half-burned up coming back. See here we’re goin’ to see the battle. Here they’re comin’ back. I looked at him and he looked at me and I said, “You know they don’t know, we didn’t tell anybody where we were goin’ did we?” “No we sure didn’t.” “What do you say, don’t you think we oughta get on back to the base.” “Yeah, that’s a good idea.” Man I told that dr-, jeep dri-, “You can stop right here buddy. That’s, stop right here.” We got out of that jeep. [Inaudible] we started going the other way. Man it was, scary! I’m tellin’ you. Man. Right there the same place, this is San Antonio airstrip. The Japanese were still up there. Well there came this P-47. You ever hear of eight pound bombs? We watched ‘em. Drop [inaudible] on these hills over there. We put ‘em, could hear and see it way out. And just i-, i-, i-, the bomb would hit that, hit those, side of that mountain and suddenly just come up, just a b-, looked like Atom bomb. TT: Wow. 17:12: AH: It. Oh, it just so much. So much (mumble). TT: Where did you live? Wh-, where you, where did you grow up? Where you from? Where, where? 17:26: AH: Baytown, Texas. TT: From Bay-, Baytown? 17:28: AH: Yeah. Was uh-, wi-. TT: How’d you get to Bryan? 17:31: AH: Okay we. Was about ’50 that was on the football team. We decided to go into the service together so we could stay together. So we joined up in Baytown, they took us to Houston. Then they sent us to Fort Sam Houston and, and this [inaudible] these people tell me, they say, “Look, you’d make a, you’d make a good Marine.” And, and we’ve. “Good ratings. You’re a high school graduate. And you’ll just go right on up with the ratings. We want you.” “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ll go to the Marines.” They tell me “the Army.” “Okay we’ve got. You’re Army material. I can see the way you look. You’d make a good soldier.” Or “Here you guys, you, you all go in the Air Corps. We need people like you.” Well hell, that’s, we’re split up by ten. Then went to radio school. Worst place I ever was, was radio school. I mean, basic training. That was at Sheppard Field. Wichita Falls, Texas. Those sandstorms up coming out of Oklahoma. It was terrible up there. Thirty mile hikes. So four of us got on the boxin’ team. To get away from a lot of this thirty mile hikes and stuff. And. Oh several time we get the hell beat out of us, but that’s all right it was worth it. We had to pa-, we’d have to get in line to go eat. You know, to the mess hall. Breakfast, dinner, supper. We just had a little card. They just walked right at the end of the line to eat and everything. We trained hard though and, and, it was, then they told me I, about two o’clock in the morning, they said, “Okay boys, you’re shipping out. You’re goin’ to.” They didn’t tell us where we go, we went to South Dakota, radio school. And, where are you from? TT: I’m, I grew up in San Antonio. 19:15: AH: We got up there I think about November somethin’. And it started s-. The radio school went 24 hours, 8 hour shifts. Radar. Not radar, just radio and mechanics. I’m, I’m a radio mechanic officer. Radio operator, mechanic, also, and then a rad-, rader-, radar technician. But, it snowed so much I. One night, woke up in the mornin’, and the barracks were completely snowed in. You couldn’t go out the winda. You couldn’t go out the front door. They had to dig us out. That’s how much it snowed. I hated that place. I hated that snow. I didn’t like it. And I was in, I was in. Ogden, Utah. That’s where Carole Lombard got killed. Hit a mountain, when she was married to Clark Gable. And on the bulletin board. One mornin’ went to look at the bulletin board. See I thought I was goin’ straight over seas. It said “Alfred D. Hanson. Report to the order room.” Went to the order room and they said, “You’re going to, Texas. Del Valle. Bergstrom Field. Here’s your train ticket.” Man, I cried. TT: Yeah. 20:41: AH: Man I was right here close to Baytown, Houston. My home, man. I got on that train and reported there and I loved it. I got there at the mess hall about two o’clock in the morning. And. And, this, went to the gate there and showed him my papers. He said, “Well you’re, you’re gonna go, to the mess hall first?” [phone rings] 21:16: AH: To the mess hall. And, there were these, pilots, co-pilots, and radio operators all in there, eatin’. This is two o’clock in the morning. [clears throat] I we-, went up to the line then. [coughs] Excuse me, and he said, “Soldier how do you want your eggs?” Now I just fell, I almost fell on the floor. Never seen anything like this before. “How do you want your eggs?” “Uh, over easy?” “Over-easy?” [Inaudible]. [Laughs]. Oh, [inaudible]. “Well you want ham. You want ham or bacon or you want both of ‘em?” “I’ll take both of ‘em.” And, “there’s your biscuits. Hot biscuits right down there.” This is two o’clock in the morning. See these crews, there. We flew, a lot of times at night. Except. Anyway I was shocked. I’d never seen anything like that before. And, went to the order room and they checked me, checked me into a cot. And we fly, in the daytime. We pull these gliders. That was dangerous. Over on the side of the airstrip there was just, piles and piles of wrecked gliders. And. You’ve seen it in movies, they show yeah, part of these gliders. Well we pulled ‘em. So one day the same guy said, before we went over seas. I said, “Hell let’s, let’s ride in one of those gliders, you want to?” “Yeah, let’s do.” So we went out there and then we hooked a glider, pulling ‘em it off. See we’ve been pulling them before and I was always scared. I said, “Let’s get in.” “Okay,” we got in that thing. It took off, and buddy, the sides are made out of fabric, and make a, hell of a scare you to death. Just hear that noise on there. Well we got up there, several thousand feet. And, when we unhooked that glider from that plane, the gli-, felt like the glider just hit a s-, s-, stone wall. I mean it just almost stopped like that. Then we glided down. And they had a big circle out there in the area, a big circle. Shoot he just came right on down to the, right there in the damn circle. This is nice and everything. But that was the first, last time with that though I didn’t like it. But I, I had an in-, it was interesting to me but a-, a-, after you spend about six months over there, you, you got the feeling to, hell with it, you’re, you’re not gonna come back to the States. I was married too. I said, I, I said, “I wish I had never gotten married.” ‘Cause, but you come and, when you lose some buddies, lose a plane, you didn’t think much of it. You, you just didn’t let it worry you, said, “Well he’s gone. That’s all right so.” It, you, get used to it. TT: So you went from Bergstrom, overseas? 24:10: AH: From Bergstrom? No from Bergstrom we went to uh, to uh, Indianapolis, Indiana. That’s where we trained for the radar. Then, via something else that was inter. It, we flew at night. We flew all, up in Canada, the Great Lakes. See I, I had an interesting position to goin’ to all these places. And we just flew at night. And then from there, see, from there they sent us to Stout Field, Indiana. And that’s where they gave us our, our pistols and. They gave us flying clothes, electric flying suits that you plug in to keep warm. Sheep-lined boots. Well hell we’re goin’, we’re goin’ to Europe. And guess where we went? Frisco, went to the Pacific. Had all that stuff. We got to Pacific and we turned it in and you know, they probably threw it away. So we just. See that isn’t it crazy? TT: Bad planning there. 25:15: AH: Wasn’t it? Yeah, we knew we was goin’ to Europe. All right, oh we don’t want to go to the Pacific. No, hell no, boy this is great. Frisco. Wh-, when they put us on the train to Frisco we knew we weren’t going to Europe. TT: Yeah, right, yeah. So how, how long were you, after you left Frisco, h-, how long were you in? 25:35: AH: Over seas? TT: Huh-huh. 25:38: AH: Close to two years. And buddy when they told me I went [inaudible] that, oh, when we got to Japan. Boy we had a little interpreting books. Made [inaudible], put your gun, put your pistols on, ‘cause we don’t know what reaction you’re gonna get when you land there. Well like I said, we didn’t come in over the bay. At Ma-, Tokyo Bay. Uh-uh, we’re comin’ over the land you know. And all of the war was over, but just so. We came in and landed and boy there was just craters everywhere and they were out there patchin’ those holes. And these buildings, you come in and just, some of these buildings has walls like eight foot thick and you could just see where, .50 caliber shells had come down through there. Wrecked airplanes. Oh it was. So, we landed there. They, they put us in a building and, had a meeting a couple of days later said, “You are no longer flying for the United States government. You are flying for the Japanese Imperial Air Force.” They turned our squadron over to the Japanese. And a couple of days later, every one of our planes, I think fourteen planes, right across the top, Imperial Carriers. They turned us. We worked for them. And it, we, we’d take these guys to Korea, [Saburo?], Singapore. All these, these officials. We hauled these officials around, to all these different places. That was interesting too, because some of those guys could speak English as well as you and I. And I, I enjoyed that. And, something else. Wait what. TT: That is, that, that’s an, see that’s an element of, the, the post-surrender that I didn’t realize that. 27:41: AH: Lot of people don’t know that. I don’t, I don’t, I don’t mention it very often. And it’s interesting that, you know we couldn’t carry anybody else. Uh-huh, just Japanese officials. And boy before they get on that plane, they bow to us too. They bow to us. TT: Yeah. I guess that was all part of the surrender that the United States would come in and help them redevelop their country and. 28:02: AH: Yeah we had to, so they’d make ‘em sign peace treaties with some of these other countries or something, whatever. And tell ‘em what they’re gonna do. And those, those Japanese people are, clean. Polite. I got hooked up with a Japanese family there and, they called, they can’t, they couldn’t say Texas, they’d say Tex-Sa. And buddy they cried when I left. And like I shed a little tear though. I got, for those kids they had and got close to ‘em. And her son was a kamikaze pilot, had his picture there. And she said, “Kamikazes” you know, she said, “Hmm-hmm-hmm. Kamikaze. Everybody got killed.” And she’d talked on about the B-29, these bombers comin’ over, “[imitates Japanese woman who made a sound of a bomber plane].” Oh and incidentally we flew over the, uh, Hiroshima. We flew over about five hundred feet. That’s pretty low. Five hundred feet, maybe lower than that. Where they dropped the Atomic bomb. TT: I bet that was some sight. 29:12: AH: Oh it was scary as hell. It was scary. And. We didn’t know anything about radiation then you know? So I’m glad, we didn’t catch anything, but it was possible if we’d have stayed there. TT: Yeah. 29:29: AH: I saw a lot of things. I did. TT: Yeah, you did. 29:33: AH: I just. Like. TT: Wow. 29:39: AH: That’s some of the places. TT: That’s the list. 29:42: AH: That’s not all of ‘em, where I went. Don’t you think I had a. Yo-, now, yo-, take Virgil. Guadalcanal. He stayed there the whole war. TT: Right. 29:53: AH: Yeah. And then lo-, look at the contrast between him and me. See? Na-, now you brought this to light. I’ve been thinking about this, the past several days. Hanson, you had a hell of a, experience. Didn’t I? TT: So do you like to travel now? I mean do you? 30:14: AH: Well I did earlier, but I didn’t now. I, I’m not in good health. My legs hurt. And wife, you knew she broke her hip. TT: Yeah, you told me that last time I was here. 30:21: AH: Yeah. So. TT: Have you, have you been. I mean since the war, have you been over to Japan or, or anywhere where? 30:28: AH: Hmm-mm. I’ll tell you what I did do. This guy there, the engineer. [Inaudible], you see me on there? TT: Yeah, bottom right. 30:38: AH: Oh I’m the youngest. I’m the youngest guy on the crew. Well he, lived in New York, he was from rich parents. He. I, this damn sure don’t go on this. TT: Okay [chuckle] 30:53: AH: He, he was cre-, crew chief you know, so he was, his daddy was a corporation lawyer in New York. They lived on 920 Park Avenue. Rich. He went to a private school and all that stuff and a lot of guys didn’t like it ‘cause he was full-bloodied Yankee. So, my daughter married a doctor from Montana and moved to New York. So, we got on a plane and went to visit. Well I said, “I wanna find him. He’s somewhere in New York.” TT: Somewhere in New York. [chuckle] 31:25: AH: Somewhere in New York. TT: In the city you mean? 31:27: AH: Somewhere. TT: In, in the city, not the state? 31:29: AH: He said he lived in. TT: In the city? Okay. 31:31: AH: Well there’s about five cities aren’t there? TT: Well yeah, yeah right. 31:34: AH: Name some of ‘em. TT: Bronx, Manhattan, Queens. 31:38: AH: Yeah you get. Yeah all that. TT: But somewhere in there. 31:41: AH: It took about two days goin’ through the [inaudible] people in the phone books. It, my son’s a. My son-, grandson, son-in-law’s a doctor up in New York. And, he got me the phone books and I started lookin’, and lookin’, and lookin’ Frank Dirk. Frank Dirk Jr. Damn if I didn’t find him. It took several days. I said, “This is Tex.” You know, “Tex? Tex?” “Hanson Tex. Al Hanson Tex.” “Oh goddamn, where are you?” I said, “I’m here in New York.” We were at, not Manhattan, what’s the. TT: Queens, Bronx? 32:29: AH: I can’t think of it. TT: Anyway. 31:31: AH: Yeah but he was way over, s-, across the state there. Way over yonder. I said. And. I said, “I’m comin’ to see you tomorrow, tell me how to get to your house.” He told me. And. See I hadn’t seen him in thirty years or so, forty years. So I went there. He, he lived in an apartment. And he had really changed. It was very, I recorded everything. I got, I got the recorder. He, he was haulin’ dope, in his own boat. Haulin’ dope from Florida to New York. And he got several years. He just got out of the pen. TT: Is that right? 33:14: AH: Yeah. And he looked bad. Hell. TT: Yeah, I can imagine, yeah. 33:19: AH: I mean, he, I, I think he was on dope. I didn’t, I didn’t in-. We talked about old time, like the bombing and stuff we went through and planes had crashed and how we lived and all that. And, and my son-in-law sittin’ right there, you know the doctor and, and. And, he went and got us some beer and then got some wine. We sat there several hours. But that’s the guy right there. And I’m sure he’s not living today ‘cause. Oh, while we were there. I’m, I’m telling you a lot of shit here man. TT: [chuckles] Don’t worry about that go ahead. 33:51: AH: While we were sitting there talkin’, there was a knock on the door. He said, “Come in.” And, it was his girlfriend. As black as hell. Nigger, black. Yeah, wasn’t bad lookin’. TT: [chuckles] That is New York though. 34:08: AH: [chuckle] She needed. She needed some money so he had her gave her some money and, and. TT: So what, you, you never really told me how you got to Bryan though. You. 34:19: AH: Oh. TT: You went. After the war where did you? 34:21: AH: [Inaudible], went to. First thing I did was got, went back to Baytown. And my wife was working for Exxon. The first thing I wanted to do was go to school. So I went to, Massey Business College in Houston just. I don’t know if it’s still there or not. Massey Business College. Took economics and history and English. And, lots of math. I wanted to get up to cost accounting, that’s all I wanted. Then I went. I went to Luling Foundation. You know where Luling is? Lockhart? Yeah? TT: Sure. 34:55: AH: Yeah. They had a meat foundation. I learned the meat business. How to s-, I used to own Readfields. I built that plant. You knew that, I told you that, yeah. So from there, I wrote to some people in, in Dallas that build locker plants. Got with them. And my father-in-law went partners together. [Inaudible], Texas, built that locker plant there. And from there, there I had six children. Had one here. We moved to here and I built this plant right here. TT: [Inaudible] plant. 35:31: AH: Yeah. That’s how I got here. TT: I see. 35:34: AH: I’ve had a hell of an experience. TT: Yeah. 35:36: AH: Had 500 acres of land between Hearne and Wheelock. What a pretty place. And I had to sell it, because of this plant. And what got me was credit. They closed this air base down out here. And I was selling these freezers. Food plan service, and shit, they eat all the food and haul ass, and left me with, make the payment to pay off the freezers. I bought freezers by the car loads. Sold a bunch of ‘em. Things were bad back in there though. There wasn’t any money like it is today. There’s lots of money goin’ on now. A guy could get a job today and make pretty damn good money if he wants to. TT: Yeah. 36:18: AH: If he gets that education you know. And you’re from where? TT: I grew up in San Antonio. And that’s where my mother still lives. 36:24: AH: Yeah, I was. Yeah I was born there. Yeah. TT: Yeah, I was born in. 36:27: AH: You want some coffee? TT: No, no I’m fine. I grew up in San Antonio and then I went to, went to college in Lubbock, went to Texas Tech. And, then to Dallas for ten years and I’ve lived here for sixteen years. 36:40: AH: How well do you know Bob Milore? TT: Pretty good. I, I, I’ve met. 36:44: AH: He was here yesterday. TT: Was he? Yeah. Uh. 36:46: AH: I practically raised him. TT: Did you? 36:48: AH: Hmm-hmm. TT: I knew his daddy. I guess I at first. I, I met Bubba just you know, when I came here. ‘Cause everybody knows Bubba. 36:55: AH: Everybody knows Bubba. TT: Yeah. And, and he wrote a little blurb in his thing about this show that I’m doin’. 37:01: AH: Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! TT: Yeah, he wrote about that. And, which I appreciated a lot. Yeah, no I, you know. I knew his daddy before he died and. 37:12: AH: Fowler? TT: Yeah. 37:13: AH: He’s here every day. Right there yeah. Drinking coffee or, maybe on the weekends he might, he might drink two beers and that’s it. I’ll have to [inaudible] him just a minute, I forgot about that. [shuffle] TT: I gotta. What I do with all of these is I, first thing I do is I take our entire conversation and I put ‘em on tape. I’ll, I’ll be glad to get you an entire tape of everything we’ve said. 37:39: AH: Will you do it? I didn’t have it turned on. TT: Oh that’s okay. Don’t worry about it, I’ve got it all. 37:43: AH: Is that a promise? TT: That’s a promise. 37:44: AH: You know how you are. Bubba’s already told me how are. TT: Yeah. [chuckle] 37:49: AH: I’ll be damned. I didn’t. TT: Anything good? [chuckle] 37:51: AH: Have you got a tape of all this? TT: Yeah. Yeah. 37:54: AH: Please let me have it. ‘Cause I want my kids to hear it. They don’t know, about what we’re talkin’. I’ve never done this before. TT: Yeah. I’m glad, I’m glad you have. 38:02: AH: I’m glad you thought of this. Yeah. And nobody else has taped it. Oh, Ben Morgan wanted. TT: Okay. 38:09: AH: Yeah. He’s leaving. What’s the date? TT: Monday. 38:13: AH: He’s goin’ to Indianapolis. TT: Will he be back? 38:16: AH: They have that convention reunion. He’ll be gone one week. Okay? I’m gonna get to see C.J. Allen for you. I’ll tell you, we talked about it, it was Friday. I couldn’t talk to Friday, or Saturday or Sunday. I have to talk to him today. And, you’ll have to go to his house or you come here though I don’t care. I, I practically raised him too, and her. Yeah. TT: Allen you mean? 38:39: AH: Yeah, see their parents. You know, they lived with me practically yeah. Come over every Sunday and fry [inaudible] made the best fried chicken. She’d use Cracker Meal, egg batter, yeah. TT: [chuckle] Yeah I wanna talk to Lynn Morgan. 38:55: AH: Lynn Morgan and C.J. Allen. Who else? TT: Oh, I, I’ll. I, I, I gotta talk to Dr. Coopers still too but I’m gonna make an appointment with him. 39:04: AH: That’s three. That’s three of ‘em. TT: Yeah. Oh I’ve got, I still got a long list of others and so forth. 39:09: Ruby Hanson (RH): [asks TT a question about coffee] TT: No thank you ma’am. I, I get up at four in the morning and I have all my coffee early. 39:13: AH: He’s waiting for you to fix dinner Ruby. TT: [laughs] RH: (mumble) TT: [laughs] No thank you Ruby. But. 39:23: AH: Well Cooper, you can talk to him here. TT: Oh I haven’t talked to him yet. 39:26: AH: He wants to talk to you. TT: Yeah I know. 39:28: AH: He was in two wars. TT: Yeah I know. 39:30: AH: You can talk about. TT: I’d rather of course talk to Morgan when you told me that. 39:32: AH: Oh shit man. TT: In Indianapolis. 39:35: AH: Yeah. TT: That was. 39:39: AH: See he was the President of it, years and years, head of it you know. He makes all of ‘em. He’s a good speaker. He goes up, for the funeral. He does music for our funerals. TT: He’s in a band isn’t he? 39:52: AH: Yes! TT: Yeah. 39:53: AH: Yeah that’s right. He has a good band. TT: I was talking to. Where’d I see his picture of him? Leaving the band. I was doing one of these shows with. Oh what’s her name? She, she runs the, R.S.V.P.—the volunteer thing downtown. And she had a picture of him then. 40:13: AH: Yeah. TT: The thing where, retired folks can volunteer and do stuff. I forgot the lady’s name. 40:17: AH: He goes in nursing homes and stuff. And twice he’s been at the V.F.W. I’ll. Yeah. TT: Right. 40:24: AH: One time he and I gave a party out there, people. And a good, I was an M.C. We had a good [inaudible]. TT: So how did he survive? That. 40:32: AH: That time he didn’t make it in that water, just holdin’ on to that raft. Just lucky. TT: Sharks went somewhere else. 40:39: AH: Oh he says he saw sharks. He’ll tell you all about it. Yeah. TT: That’s gotta be tough. Did you see the? 40:46: AH: The other day? TT: You ever seen the movie Jaws? That first movie? 40:50: AH: Oh I. It was on the other day. TT: Well you know they talk about the Indianapolis in that movie. 40:55: AH: Yes they do! He does! That. TT: They’re sitting in there in the boat. 40:58: AH: The guy that, the guy that had the boat was drunk. The captain of the boat. TT: Quit. But [mumble] 41:04: AH: He was on it! TT: And he was talking to the professor. And, and they do a whole. They do a whole conversation about the Indianapolis. 41:12: AH: Oh there’s so many people. TT: I remember that in that movie. 41:15: AH: That don’t know, that have never heard of the Indianapolis. Lot of kids and people that don’t. It’s right at the end of the war! The war was almost over! And. He said that, th-, they brought that Japanese captain over here. They thought he was gonna kill ‘em you know. He, he was scared. Had him in a court room. Well I see there’s two books, about it. I, he’s got ‘em. I read both of ‘em. Both books. And it said that, he got him his or-, he, he didn’t matter if he zigzagged or what “Nah, I’d have got ‘em.” You know that the Jap said. But, but, in the book it tells you that they already told ‘em that, Hawaii they said, there’s, there’s no Japanese submarines in that area. Although a ship had been sunk earlier, several hundred miles from there, but they didn’t mention that. TT: Yeah. 42:06: AH: He shouldn’t have been court martialed. He will one day be ex-, exonerated. Is that the word? It’s, he will be. That captain will be. Exonerated. TT: Now you Tom? 42:20: AH: Tom, he was in the Marine Corps. He was at Tachikawa, same place I was. TT: In Vietnam? 42:25: AH: Yeah. Vietnam war, yeah. TT: And your other son. Is he your oldest? 42:32: AH: No, next to the oldest. He’s the only, that was in the service. Three of ‘em were here yesterday. Let’s see there’s Steven, Mark, Tommy, and Rodney. You got two that live at Austin. One in Baytown. TT: Are, are those daughter-in-laws or any daughters? 42:50: AH: That’s my daughters. TT: So, so those are daughters. 42:54: AH: Seven children. TT: You, you got three girls and four boys. 42:56: AH: Yeah. That was taken down in front of the library. It’s a good picture isn’t it? TT: Oh the, the, the, the, the. 43:04: AH: Old Bryan Library. TT: Yeah. Yeah the, the Carnegie. 43:08: AH: Do you know Mark O’Connell? TT: Uh. 43:12: AH: He runs as quick as a flash. TT: Oh yeah. Huh-huh. 43:14: AH: He did that. He took that picture. TT: Wow. Is that the o-. You’re pretty proud of your war experience. Did you. 43:26: AH: Yes I am. TT: That you lived in that generation? 43:28: AH: Yes I am. Yeah. TT: It’s a, it’s a, it’s a generation that. It learned to work, to me, it learned its work ethic probably first from the Depression. And then goin’ straight into World War II. Those two. 43:42: AH: Yeah. TT: Living through both of those episodes probably created the work ethic that unfortunately we don’t really have anymore. 43:47: AH: Yeah I was living in. See my mommy and daddy were deaf. TT: Is that right? 43:52: AH: Yeah, they didn’t speak a word of English. They had four boys. And. Are you in a hurry? TT: No. 44:00: AH: I want you to read somethin’ I wrote to President. It’s somethin’ I wrote the President.